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Fox News contributor Miranda Devine exposed fresh and troubling details this weekend about the would-be assassin who opened fire at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally, saying her team uncovered a sprawling digital trail that authorities have not fully disclosed. Devine walked through hours of online posts, comments and interactions showing a clear and chilling trajectory in the suspect’s online life, and she urged tougher scrutiny of how law enforcement handled the case. Her appearance on Life, Liberty & Levin pushed questions the mainstream press has been content to ignore.
The attack itself was one of the darkest moments in recent political history: on July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired multiple rounds from a rooftop toward the stage at the Butler Farm Show grounds, grazing former President Donald Trump and killing at least one bystander before being shot by a Secret Service sniper. The chaotic response on the ground and the near-miss of a presidential assassination sparked immediate inquiries into operational failures and security lapses that should never have happened. Those facts remain painfully clear in the public record.
Devine says the digital record tells an even more complex story, noting that Crooks’s online presence shifted dramatically from pro-Trump activity to vitriolic anti-Trump rhetoric, including dozens of violent comments on multiple platforms and hundreds of YouTube comments traced to his accounts. She described a period of disappearance and then re-emergence online where the tone hardened and the subject matter turned toward violent overthrow and assassination, even allegedly communicating with extremist figures overseas. Those findings make the notion that this was merely a lone, inexplicable act much harder to accept without an exhaustive public accounting.
At the same time, federal investigators have insisted they found no credible foreign-directed conspiracy, concluding after extensive probes that Crooks acted alone, even as they discovered an undetonated explosive device in his vehicle and an array of pre-attack preparations. The FBI’s public conclusions do not erase the troubling questions about why a voluminous digital footprint and warning signs were apparently not identified or acted upon in time. Americans deserve clarity on whether investigative priorities or bureaucratic failures allowed this threat to go unchecked.
Scrutiny of the Secret Service’s role is equally damning: a Senate report and contemporaneous accounts have detailed miscommunications, failures to secure key vantage points and an overall lack of preparedness that contributed to the catastrophe in Butler. Those operational errors are not abstract bureaucratic quibbles; they are concrete lapses that cost lives and nearly changed the course of the nation. Accountability must follow, no matter how politically inconvenient it is for anyone in power.
Miranda Devine and others have pointed out that while investigators chased every possible angle, there was a worrying institutional blind spot—an obsession with culture-war priorities that left real threats insufficiently monitored. If law enforcement and intelligence resources are diverted by political obsession rather than focused on tangible violent threats, the consequences are predictable and deadly. The public should not accept assurances; it should demand evidence that agencies are refocusing on core counterterrorism and protective duties.
Newly surfaced footage and social media clips have only deepened the mystery around timing, preparation and who knew what and when, underscoring the need for a transparent, independent review that can pierce the fog of official spin. The viral circulation of that footage has forced questions the legacy media tried to bury back into the public conversation, exposing the yawning gap between what the public sees and what investigators say. This is about restoring trust in institutions, and trust cannot be rebuilt without full disclosure.
This episode must be a turning point: Congress and the executive branch should stop treating security as a partisan afterthought and start treating it as the nonpartisan duty it is. The revelations Miranda Devine highlighted should prompt immediate reforms to how online radicalization is monitored, how interagency warnings are handled and how protective details secure venues. If lessons are not learned and personnel changes not made, the next failure will be on all who put politics ahead of protection.
